This specification relates to managing computing resources consumed by a media player program, and specifically to reducing the media player program's resources when necessary by instructing individual player instances to reduce resources or to shut down based on a specified priority.
A web browser is a software program for retrieving and presenting information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is typically identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to related resources. Aside from HTML, browser programs can generally display any kind of content that can be part of a web page. Most browser programs can display images, audio, video, and XML files, and often have plug-ins to support media player programs, e.g., Flash applications and Java applets.
There may be situations when multiple instances of a media player program are running in a browser program. Moreover, the browser program hosting the multiple running instances may be executed by a mobile device having limited computing resources.